The challenges inherit in widening a traditional classroom to a global audience are breathing new life into the art of teaching and learning. Professors are finding that they need to reshape and rethink their instructional approach when teaching tens of thousands of virtual students.

These challenges will be overcome with the help of the students themselves. For example, the crowd-sourcing of moderating discussion forums and of grading via peer-to-peer evaluation is becoming critical to running a MOOC.

Peer-to-peer evaluation of assignments, such as essays, is permitting the MOOC to go beyond computer science and engineering, which were suited to automated, computer grading. Humanities courses are starting to jump aboard.

There is, of course, still much to learn, especially about how well students learn in a MOOC. MOOC-space is young, wild, and untamed.

A couple years ago I was put in charge of working with UCLA’s Calibrated Peer Review for Eric Mazur. He was really excited about it — I was less so. But my problem was I was looking at the application, not the concept. Just because an application is overdeveloped drivel doesn’t mean what they were trying to do isn’t awesome. I’m of the thinking they should have simplified it. That seems to be the case with just about everything I see. Applications shouldn’t be as complicated as they’re made. The problem is there are usually too many people involved in a project’s inception and everyone needs to put a piece of themselves into it. But I digress. edX will be great.

I don’t think Mazur used the CPR for more than 2 semesters. Probably because there was too much overhead and it wasn’t intuitive enough. But a poor implementation doesn’t mean a poor idea.

Or at least that’s my theory on this. I hadn’t seen any progress with online implementations of this, people haven’t been pushing this teaching technique yet and it’s disappointing (or telling).